Well it's all over bar the shouting - the last episode aired in the States last night - and expect a good deal of that in the coming weeks and months. For nearly six years and almost 60 hours The Wire focused with forensic precision on a different facet of Baltimore, using that poor, bloody, brutalised city to make some extremely unpalatable points about America and the death of the American dream.

In my view The Wire is not just the best crime drama ever screened but also quite simply the best drama. Bitingly funny, heartbreaking and sometimes ferociously violent, it took us deep into the lives of fresh-faced child drug dealers, broken unions, kindly junkies, mendacious reporters, crumbling schools, dyspeptic cops and venal, self-serving politicians. Astonishingly, we grew to understand all of them, like most of them and even love some of them - the doomed D'Angelo and the broken, bullied Bubbs spring most readily to mind. Really wicked people, the sort we glimpse in CSI, simply do not exist in The Wire. There are just people doing very wicked things for very good reasons.

David Simon and Ed Burns, the ex-Baltimore Sun crime reporter and the ex-Baltimore homicide cop who created the show, would doubtless say that villainy is as easy to find in the marbled corridors of City Hill as it is on any of Baltimore's smack and crack corners. Simon says: "The Wire is dissent. It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly and that no, we are not going to be all right." In other words, The Wire has no interest in attacking individuals but rather the institutions that create them. That aside (and with apologies to Simon and Burns), I still have my own shortlist of the five greatest Wire villains.

William A Rawls (John Dorman)

Rawls embodies the foul-mouthed, numb-skulled inertia of the Baltimore Police Department. Coming over a little like Catch 22's Colonel Cathcart, Rawls' concern is not to solve crime but rather to keep violent crime, especially the murders of young black men, off the books lest it mess with the fiction that crime is being held at bay. A high-minded, self-righteous hypocrite, Rawls is married with children, though he can often be found in some of Baltimore's more down-at-heel gay bars.

Russell "Stringer" Bell (Idris Elba)

String, as he is known, could under different circumstances have been almost anything - a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, perhaps, or an economics lecturer at an Ivy League school. As number two in a drug syndicate he employs brains where his partner, Avon Barksdale, prefers brawn. He is one of The Wire's scariest and most brilliantly realised characters.

Omar Little (Michael K Williams)

Omar, a gay stick-up artist, has a fastidious aversion to profanity but far fewer scruples when it comes to wielding his shotgun. He goes after the Barksdale/Bell crew, leaving a slew of bodies in his wake. A little like Robin Hood - if Robin Hood stole from the poor and gave it to himself.

Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector)

Stringer and Avon appeared to have some sort of moral code but Marlo has none. Softly spoken, dead-eyed and utterly, almost self-destructively ruthless, Marlo represents a new generation of drug dealer. His two enforcers, Snoop and Chris, travel the streets of west Baltimore dispatching rivals with staggeringly casual brutality.

Felicia "Snoop" Pearson (Felicia Pierson)

A teenage girl with an appetite for violence, she manages to surprise and impress even the terrifying Marlo. If this strikes you as unlikely then be aware that the actor who plays her grew up on the corners of Baltimore, regarding the drug gangs as her family. She spent most of her adolescence in Maryland State Prison, serving time for second-degree murder. Michael K Williams (who plays Omar) introduced her to Simon and Burns and she is now a professional actor. She's the real deal, so much so that her character shares her name. Oh and what a voice!